Jane Hirshfield

I Imagine Myself In Time

I imagine myself in time looking back on myself--
this self, this morning,
drinking her coffee on the first day of a new year
and once again almost unable to move her pen through the iron air.
Perplexed by my life as Midas was in his world of sudden metal,
surprised that it was not as he'd expected, what he had asked.
And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be?

"It is Night. It is Very Dark."

Rainfall past any interrogation.
Questions and answers are not the business of rain.

Yet I step forward by them--
Left foot? Yes. Right foot? Yes.
And all the time wanting to be soaked through
as the flowers of the apricot that open too early,
in mid-December,
are soaked all the way through their slow petals but do not fall.

The colors only slightly deepen.
The fruit has far to travel.
Left foot by right foot under the hidden stars.

And I?
Question by question,
like an elephant trained to paint what is in her heart.

The Heat of Autumn

The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That's autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.

The Meeting

The rat was fat and healthy and equally surprised,
almost insulted. Leaving only because I was larger
but renouncing no claim.
As I, at times, have looked my fate in the face
and acknowledged nothing.
Continued as if I could, as if this life were mine to choose,
and I the unquestioned lord of my basement kingdom
with its single, high, and unwashed corner window.

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Jane Hirshfield's fifth collection of poetry, Given Sugar, Given Salt, winner of the 2001 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is newly out in paperback. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. A Selected Poems, translated by Magda Heydel, will appear from Znak in Poland later this year. contents | next